


the moon in the winter

by snsk



Category: One Direction (Band), Zayn Malik (Musician)
Genre: Gen, Identity, M/M, Metafiction, Religion, Self-Acceptance, references to islamophobia, side harry/louis - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-30
Updated: 2015-01-30
Packaged: 2018-03-09 16:54:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3257351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snsk/pseuds/snsk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zain means beauty, and so does its variation, Zayn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the moon in the winter

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. references to islamophobia, references to the israel/palestine conflict

aik:

Zayn hadn’t always been Zayn, after all; the Y had replaced the I after he’d gotten through the first audition, when the producers started viewing him as someone who just maybe had a chance in hell. Zayn was cool, it was sultry, giggled Safaa, it was memorable, more striking, more--

“Exotic,” his aunt, said, over the phone. Zayn could almost see her eyes, walnut, wide, flash in anger all the way over in Bradford, which seemed so far away, when only days ago it had been everything. “Exotic, but not dangerous. Zain with an I is too Muslim for them. It reminds them too much of the people they are terrorizing, yet pretending do not exist back home.”

“’m sure it’s nothing to do with that, chachi,” he assured her. “It’s just, tv stuff, is all. They do it to everyone.”

She hmph’ed. In the background, he could hear Hamaira and Amad fighting over the 3.30 pm cartoon slot. “Anyway, when are you coming for dinner,” she said. “They must let you come home soon. You’ve been away far too long.”

“Soon, chachi,” he assured her. It had been two weeks, exactly.

Almost five years on, halfway around the world, and not having been home in four and a half months and counting, the conversation comes to him clear as day, the crisp sound of his aunt’s indignation, the emphatic conviction that he’d be back for qurma before she knew it. He lets out a sudden, choked-off snort at that, and the sound technician, who’d been checking his earpiece, who has his aunt’s exact eye colour, lifts an eyebrow at him.

“Something the matter, Zayn?” ze asks.

“Nothing, babe,” he says. “Just thought of something funny,” when it isn’t, really, at all-- is just something to think about.

 

dou:

It became far too easy to adapt to Zayn. One would think it would be harder, having seventeen years of practise with his given name, but eventually, you saw the people around you referring to you with the Ys in their mouth, and you adapted.

Here is a fact Zayn was once told, by a family friend:

When a letter changes, the whole meaning of a name can, too; Faraz means warrior, Faraj is relief.

Here is another:

Zain means beauty, and so does its variation, Zayn.

And here is a story, and a side note: 

“Va lee yuh,” Zayn says, sharply. “Get it right.”

The kid looks up at him, big eyed, and Waliyha elbows at a rib painfully to stop him embarrassing her, but Zayn won’t apologise, not today.

When you fuck up someone’s given name, the one they choose to use, you are fucking up their meaning. 

 

teen:

He went home sooner than expected, because his granddad died.

His granddad was Irish and medium rare was his favourite with a side of mashed potatoes, but also kofta and Man City. He was the only one who tended to the garden and he married Zayn’s grandmother while sleet fell outside, and he kissed her while it whirled, Zayn had seen pictures. Walter loved his daughter and tried at a relationship with his son in law, and adored his grandkids, even if he did bore them occasionally with stories of Irish resistance. When Zayn had been seven years old, he had been learning how to write in Arabic, and one day he’d been left alone for a bit and was found scribbling his name, with Magic Marker, over the walls of his grandad’s house.

Walter came into the house from tending to the hydrangeas and watched him for a bit.

“Do mine, will you?” he requested.

“Do your what, dranpa?” asked Zayn.

“How would you spell my name?” Walter asked, getting out a sheet of paper.

Zayn flopped onto his stomach and frowned, squinting his eyes. “This is hard,” he announced after thirty seconds. “Your name is weird.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” Walter laughed. “Keep at it, though, little man.”

On the next visit, Zayn arrived triumphantly brandishing a piece of paper, which Walter promptly framed.

Eleven years later, Zayn got it tattooed below his collarbone.

 

chaar:

Harry and Louis thought they were being terribly subtle. Zayn thought they were terribly cute, but he’d never admit it to them. Outside, he just rolled his eyes when they used him to play their weird little jealousy game, and huffed when Louis was spread out over Harry’s lap with his feet in Zayn’s face, and glared when they tried to disturb his sleep, full on death glared, so that stopped pretty fast.

(and pretended he didn’t hear them fucking in Harry’s bunk-- yeah, cause covering his mouth with your hand also prevents the bed from squeaking, Louis.)

When Louis came out to him-- with fingers shivering like a smoker trying cold turkey, with a nervous laugh that Zayn took as meaning he could laugh it off as a joke if Zayn reacted badly-- Zayn didn’t say I know. He said I’m proud of you, he said that’s fucking great, Lou, and he could feel Louis sag, like he’d been carrying something too long, dragged it along too far.

He came from a religious family, but he came from a loving family, and he liked to think they’d keep him, if he ever told them he identified as something other than blatantly heterosexual. 

Zayn visited Louis’ family once, with Harry and Louis. While it wasn’t obviously, overtly unpleasant, he could see the way Harry’s fingers curled tighter into Louis’ palm under the dinner table, how by the end of the weekend, Louis had darker circles than when he’d come home, when he’d come home to get rid of them, and how Harry and Louis slept as he passed them on the way for a midnight piss-- they slept bracketing each other, tense-like, in a way they never displayed in their own home, or even on another continent.

He called his mum, the next morning. 

“You know, there’s this saying in Arabic your father taught me once,” his mum said, and mangled its pronounciation utterly and completely. 

“What?” said Zayn.

“Oh, forget it, I’m never going to get the hang of the vowels,” Trisha said sadly. Zayn privately thought it was a whole bigger problem than the vowels, but he held his tongue. “Anyway, it goes: The knife of the family does not cut. Of course, gorgeous in Arabic. But you get my gist.”

Zayn did.

 

paanch:

Singing is something that might mean this is all worth it, and so are the boys. Zayn remembers that, on his bad days. Of course, the whole thing is a dream: arenas and stadiums and music videos and books and movies and gifts and seeing your face on tv and being the Sexiest something or the other and the fans, always the fans. But it is not something to hold onto when the lights start to blind, or the shrieks start to hurt, or the night swallows you up.

Most times, Niall plays a stupid tune, or Harry takes him very seriously to see an exhibit of dead butterflies, or Liam and Louis and him let the smoke get dragged into their lungs, absorb the prickly, dangerous sensations like a sponge, and breathe it out. It floats into the sky, or the Mystery Machine’s air vents. Out, anyway. Away. And it gets a bit alright, then.

 

chhay:

This is not a love story, and for once, it really isn’t.

 

saat:

For Eid this year, the five of them are experiencing what a layover is like in Singapore’s famed Changi airport, and it will be another eight hours until the flight to Australia.

Zayn is half asleep, head lolling out of his seat. They should really move somewhere more comfortable, but nobody is bothering at the moment. Louis is watching a movie with Harry, and Liam’s spread out on the floor. Niall’s taking pictures of his shoes, or the terribly white floor, or something.

And then Liam’s alarm rings, and he sleepily reaches for it, and says: “Hey! Happy Eid, Zayn.”

\--because it’s midnight in Singapore, and Liam Payne set a stupid alarm for the first of Shawwal, and Niall is saying, “Hey, we should do something,” earnestly, and Louis agrees, and Harry says Eid Mubarak, Zayn. God bless--

And they do do something. They visit the Enchanted Garden in terminal 2, all dazzling LED and weirdly surreal nature sounds, and they manage to scare some children in the play area with Harry’s frog face (“I was only trying to say hi,” he maintains, sadly), and they watch the end of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in the mini movie theatre. They take pictures with Kinetic Rain, billed as the largest kinetic sculpture in the world, and they take a short dip in the pool and have no idea where to dry their clothes, and they take Zayn to eat qurma, in the food court.

 

aatth:

Drawing is how Zayn draws the stuff out of his veins in a more permanent way then chemicals; he lefts it wind his way out, dripping with poison, and lets it settle on the canvas, infuses it with colour. And it might not be pretty and it won't win any awards, no matter what the fans say, but it is enough. Enough to transfer the words he hears and the things he reads about the people he knows and the people he doesn’t, all aching in their own way, into swirls of red, green, purple black, into bold lines of gruesome faces. It is not enough. It is enough. He does it for the people he knows, and the people he doesn’t. He imagines his second cousin’s cafe, windows scribbled with slurs. His granddad’s wall. In childish print, his name. He paints over it, remakes it all anew.

It’s not all that. It’s Niall’s skateboard, an abstract something of how Doniya sounds, off key in the morning shower. The colour of Louis’ hair in sunlight. The shade of Harry’s eyes when he looks at Louis. Safaa, Waliyha, to the pace of their skipping. The notes of the tune Liam’s humming, sketched. His father, bold and quiet-- what colour is that? He is a bear, golden brown, and his Mum beside him, a bigger swirl of scales. Wings, Zayn doesn’t know. Both. All. She is everything, they all are. 

They are all things Zayn thinks about a lot more than he thinks about the atrocities, and sometimes he feels bad about it, and most times he offers up a duua and once or twice, attempts the quiet movements his father had taught him, long ago. They feel awkward to him now, he feels heavy handed-- it’s been so long, but.

But he turns his head to the left, and swipes a hand over his face, and he thinks, Hope you heard me. Thinks, this was for them.

 

nau:

For all that Zayn loves his bandmates--

“There is no peaceful solution, Harry,” he says, trying to keep his voice as even as possible, “they are murdering innocent citizens. Meanwhile Palestine have killed a soldier or two. They don’t need to talk, the other side need to stop.”

“I still think that if the leaders just sat and talked it through, compromised, they could avoid this senseless war.”

“It is not a war, Harry,” Zayn hisses, polysterene cup crushing in his fist as he stands up. “It is a massacre. It is my people, being massacred. It has being going on for centuries, and it will not stop.”

Later, Harry comes to him, and apologises. Which for Harry is a big thing, because for all he’s so nice and kind, for all he’s sweet and peace’s biggest ambassador, he is stubborn as fuck, like a donkey, as Zayn’s dad would say, and that is what causes Harry and Louis’ biggest fights: that Harry will never outright apologise if he doesn’t think he is completely in the wrong.

“I will never stop thinking that working out conflict peacefully is always the right thing to do. But I recognize that sometimes, men do evil things, and talking won’t stop them, and in the meantime, people suffer. And I’m sorry,” he says, and Zayn wants to say don’t apologise for the things horrible men do, but the words get caught in his throat. “I’m sorry that I don’t know enough, and I can’t do anything, and I’m sorry I didn’t really listen, and I will try to. More.”

Zayn looks at Harry, and inexplicably thinks of Waliyha back home; she fights her own battles now. He may love Harry dearly, but Harry will never understand, what it was like, growing up mixed race Muslim in East Bowling, Bradford. Will never be able to feel the heat of their glares on his back, searing enough that you had to move further from the fire -- and move schools he did, because by then, Zayn had learnt the value of self preservation-- will never have to hear his aunt talk about his brothers and sisters in far off countries, suffering, horror and sympathy bleeding through the line, a thread of guilty relief that she is here, relatively safe.

He is trying, though. Zayn curls a hand around the back of Harry’s neck. They get up and go in to pack.

 

dus:

“Uh,” Zayn said, looking at their dinner. “I’m Muslim, though.”

Niall paused in the middle of stuffing one pork roll into his mouth. “Daf cool, you neber menshund.”

“Shut up, Niall,” Louis said, and it was still early days yet, but the band could recognize it as the fondness it was, a running joke already. “Zayn, does that mean you can’t eat pork?”

“Nah, not for me,” Zayn decided.

“I also thought Muslims couldn’t drink though?” Harry said, hesitantly.

“We can’t.”

“You drink more than me,” Liam and his one kidney said, sounding affronted. Personally, Zayn had his doubts about Liam’s doctor, seeing as he seemed to be more into and able to do extreme sports than any sane person should, let alone someone with a sole kidney, but he’d let it slide for now.

Now, he said: “I don’t-- always follow the rules. I’m far from the best example of Islam you’ll encounter. I don’t pray, most times, and I drink. And I don’t agree with some of our followers intepret it. But I guess I try, sometimes. About things. I do believe, see.”

He felt horribly embarrased, but also quite pleased with himself; up until that point he hadn’t been sure of what his convictions were. He hadn’t even known that he’d known. 

They ate Thai that night, instead, just like that, which was how Zayn kind of already knew he’d grow to be too attached to these four complete idiots.

Zayn might be something they chose for him, but he has made it his. And it is his meaning.

“Chachi,” he said, later, on Skype, Hamaira racing past with Amad’s new Iron Man toy, Amad in hot pursuit, “booked my flight for July, gotta spend, like, a bit of Ramadhan with yall this year.”

 

from a complete guide to Zayn Malik’s tattoos:  
ليكون صحيحا من أنت ("Be true to who you are" in Arabic)  
on left collarbone  
c. April 4, 2012


End file.
